The Washington Post today reports that the economic worries of Americans just are not registering with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. While many people spend their days worried about gas prices, rising inflation and a falling stock market, lawmakers are busy interfering with the court system and trying to increase the deficit by privatizing Social Security. Increasingly, Congress and the President are just out of touch with the economic worries of Americans. Now it seems they are out of touch with the economic worries of the Federal Reserve Chairman.

Alan Greenspan testified today before the Senate Budget Committee and had this to say:

Indeed, under existing tax rates and reasonable assumptions about other spending, these projections make clear that the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, in which large deficits result in rising interest rates and ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years. But most important, deficits as a percentage of GDP in these simulations rise without limit. Unless that trend is reversed, at some point these deficits would cause the economy to stagnate or worse.

So the Federal Reserve Chairman is basically saying to President Bush and his allies in Congress, “keep this up and you’ll bankrupt the country.” Future generations will be stuck with the bill.

- Theo LeCompte

On a party-line 10-8 vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee today approved California Judge Janice Rogers Brown for a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Conservative congressional leaders cannot fathom why progressives (and many independent observers) think Brown is “out of the mainstream.” Here is a clue:

Janice Rogers Brown Equates Social Security With Cannibalism: “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free’ stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.”

Janice Rogers Brown Supports Age Discrimination: “Discrimination based on age does not mark its victim with a stigma of inferiority and second class citizenship…it is the unavoidable consequence of that universal leveler: time.”

Janice Rogers Opposes Everything About the New Deal: “The New Deal…inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. 1937…marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution.”

Janice Rogers Brown Opposes Government: “Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies….The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.”

Janice Rogers Brown Supports Discriminatory Speech: Ignoring Supreme Court precedent, Brown has argued that racially discriminatory speech in the workplace is protected by the First Amendment.

Karl Rove on impugning the motives of your political opponents:

“Rove attested that ‘most people I know on both sides of the aisle actually believe in the positions they take,’ and he proposed a rule: ‘Unless you have clear evidence to the contrary, commentators should answer arguments instead of impugning the motives of those with whom they disagree.‘”
– Washington Post, 4/19/05

White House press secretary Scott McClellan on opposition to John Bolton’s nomination:

“I think what you’re seeing is the ugly side of Washington, D.C., that people are playing politics with his nomination. … We hope that [opponents of Bolton] on the committee would stop playing politics and stop raising these unsubstantiated accusations and move forward on a committee vote.”
– 4/20/05

South Carolina Rep. John Graham Altman killed a bill which would protect the victims of domestic abuse against their batterers. He had this to say for himself:

“I mean you women want it one way and not another. Women want to punish the men, and I do not understand why women continue to go back around men who abuse them…. tell me what self respecting person is going back around someone who beats them?”

The legislation would have made domestic abuse a felony in South Carolina. (Currently, it’s only a misdemeanor, legally equal to, say, littering or jay-walking.) Domestic abuse is a deadly serious problem in this country. The National Domestic Violence Hotline has received over a million calls for assistance from abused women in the past decade. In fact, statistics show nearly one-third of American women report having been physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives. According to the American Institute on Domestic Violence, on average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in this country every day.

Altman may refuse to make it a felony to beat your wife, but heaven help you if you hurt a chicken. The same week he killed the domestic abuse bill, the congressman voted to protect gamecocks from cockfights, shuddering:

“I was all for that. Cockfighting reminds me of the Roman circus, coliseum.”

Yesterday, Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-WV) refused to reorganize the Ethics Committee, despite an offer by Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) to investigate Tom DeLay. Here was Speaker Dennis Hastert’s reaction:

There are “probably four or five cases out there dealing with top-level Democrats. There’s a reason they don’t want to go to the ethics process.”

Two responses:

1. If Dennis Hastert knows of members, from either party, who have violated House rules, he has an obligation to start naming names. America deserves an ethical Congress.

2. Haster’s claim that Mollohan is trying to protect his own makes no sense. The offer was rejected by Mollohan because DeLay refuses to restore the rules of the Ethics Committee, which allowed an investigation to go forward in the event of a 5-5 split. (The Ethics Committee is the only committee in Congress that is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.) DeLay insists that no investigation move forward with fewer than six votes. In others words, the rules Mollohanwants will make it easier for Democrats to be investigated.

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli was grilled about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s reported directive to her staff to keep mum on John Bolton’s nomination. Here’s how it began:

QUESTION: Also, The Washington Post reported that Secretary Rice said she didn’t want any information coming out of the Department that could adversely affect the nomination. Is there any truth to that?

MR. ERELI: That is a very inaccurate report and obviously I think you will understand that I’m not going to get into what is said in private staff meetings…

QUESTION: But you’re also saying that she didn’t say that she didn’t want any information coming up that could adversely affect the nomination.

MR. ERELI: That is just not an accurate reflection of the meeting.

First, Ereli says the report was inaccurate without saying how it was inaccurate. This is a classic way of deflecting the question without answering the question.

But then it gets even more interesting:

QUESTION: She wants information out that could adversely affect his nomination?

MR. ERELI: I would say that the Secretary strongly supports this nomination, feels that John Bolton should be confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

This was a perfect opportunity for Ereli to end the controversy. He could have simply said that Rice supports full cooperation with the committee. But he didn’t. Instead he said that Rice believe Bolton should be confirmed.

QUESTION: But that’s a different issue and a different question than whether she has asked the people in the Department not to say anything that would adversely impact the —

MR. ERELI: I’m not aware that any such thing was ever said.

Another carefully worded statement. He’s not saying that she requested her staff withhold information from the committee. Ereli is saying he doesn’t know whether or not that was ever said. It illustrates the thinness of his earlier claim that the report was inaccurate.

Here are the two questions Condoleezza Rice needs to answer to settle this controversy:

1. Should employees of the State Department provide the committee with any information on John Bolton they believe is relevant to his nomination?

2. Have you ever suggested, in any way, that employees of the State Department withhold certain kinds of information from the committee?